While authorities believe the shooting deaths – in the family’s home at 5012 N. Timothy Way in the Farmington neighborhood – were the result of a “double murder-suicide,” the “investigation is ongoing,” Skinner said in an earlier release on Monday.

Shortly after 4 p.m. Sunday, emergency dispatchers received a call about “a possible shooting at the residence of 5012 N. Timothy Way,” the sheriff said.

“Upon Delaware County sheriff’s deputies arriving, three victims were located inside the residence,” the sheriff said. “It appeared that all three victims suffered from gunshot wounds.”

Rylee Ritchie was a student at Del-Com Schools.

“Delaware Community School Corp. has experienced an unexpected loss and we ask the entire community for your thoughts and prayers for the family, friends, faculty, staff and entire personnel as we move forward,” Superintendent Reece Mann said Monday.

“Our school district has initiated our school crisis plan in providing the necessary resources needed within all our school buildings."

While homicides are not common in Muncie and Delaware County – the two slayings discovered Sunday marked the community’s first of 2019 – double homicides are especially rare.

The double slaying might have been Delaware County’s first in nearly 27 years.

In July 1992, Wayne R. Wiseman, a 36-year-old rural Daleville resident, choked his wife to death and suffocated their 6-year-old daughter before fatally shooting himself in the chest.

Authorities said marital and financial problems apparently preceded those killings and his suicide.

Before that, Muncie’s most recent double homicide apparently took place on New Year’s Day 1989, when a Muncie couple – Donald Gene Smith, 33, and Alma Faye Marie Conley, 23 – were fatally stabbed in their East 26th Street apartment.

Two Muncie residents, Suzanne Faye Rainey and Samuel “Snake” Redwine, later received 100-year sentences for their roles in the slayings.

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Redwine died in prison, in 1992. Rainey, now 54, is incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison, with a projected release date in April 2040.

“I think double homicides are extraordinarily rare in Delaware County,” said Delaware County Prosecutor Eric Hoffman, who will eventually be asked to review evidence gathered concerning the three deaths discovered Sunday.

Douglas Walker is a news reporter at The Star Press. Contact him at 765-213-5851 or at dwalker@muncie.gannett.com.